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They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.
by breezybottom 1mo ago
They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.
- tptacek 1mo agoTo do what?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- runarberg 1mo agoTo not destroy rare books.
- tptacek 1mo agoWhen you read "rare books", what are you thinking these are? The 404 article that spun this story up goes into more detail. These are like vanity press books. They're rare because nobody cares about them. The book industry already destroys these books.
- runarberg 1mo agoI am thinking about a long essay Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson wrote to his pals abroad, and were left abroad. I am thinking about a photo book by an Indonesian naturalist who is famous on Bali, and took amazing photos of wildlife on Sulawesi in 1926, and colored in, and somehow ended up in New Jersey in the 1980s. I am thinking about a collection of essays written by a teenage J.D. Salinger who he left unsigned at a café thinking nobody would want to read them but just leaving it up to chance. Or maybe a Jackson Pollock sketchbook he lost at a party which ended in the host’s bookshelf, and finally at an estate sale. Plenty of such unknown unknown exist, and the AI machine will inevitably destroy a bunch of them at this scale.
- tptacek 1mo agoYou're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. This is all such a special-pleading argument. You know what other institution snatches up books and destroys them at huge scale? Public library systems. People clean out their attics and basements and drop off huge boxes full of books at libraries; libraries take the things they know will circulate, and destroy the rest. Take a guess as to how Þórbergur Þórðarson fares at the Newark Public Library. Wait, bad example, they stopped accepting book donations because nobody wants your old books. They tell you to give the books to thrift stores instead. Guess what the thrift stores do with them? You know how many times I've read stories about the grave damage libraries are doing to human culture? Zero, zero times.
- frm88 1mo agoYou're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. Source? You state that in a tone that implies you have verifiable knowlege of this. All the information I found says that the exact number, titles and authors are under NDA.
- fenomas 1mo agoNot under US copyright law. The Bartz case ruled that if you scan a book and destroy the original it's considered format-shifting and you're likely fine. But not so for keeping the original and using the scan in its place - Internet Archive tried that (in an incredibly limited way), and publishers sued and won. So companies scanning books already know they'll be sued, successfully, if they don't destroy the originals. So they destroy the originals.
- parineum 1mo agoThey are "forced" to do this because that's what they have to do to abide by copyright law. They can't create a digital duplicate without destroying the original.
- breezybottom 1mo agoSince when do AI companies care about copyright law? They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them.
- alightsoul 1mo agoSince they had to pay 1.5 billion for it
- freejazz 1mo agoYou'd think they could've negotiated something better than $3k per work if they had actually gone to the table first.
- eru 1mo ago> They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them. That's pretty silly. My competitor can't ride my bike either, and I didn't have to destroy the bike for that to be true.
- gpt5 1mo agoA little meta - I want to point out demagogic/populist comments like these that try to clear all nuance and brush a topic in black and white tend to come from a really small portion of the users here, but the same user (whose account is only 4 months old), dominates posts like this by posting many many bait-like comments in the same post that deviate the discussion away from meaning and insight. This is just one example, but it has become unfortunately common across all social media platforms.
- freejazz 1mo agoIf that's true, then why did they pirate so many books?